• Defending Champion Mikael Lundberg will attempt to make history by becoming the first player to successfully defend the Imperial Collection Russian Open and join Iain Pyman as the only other multiple winners of the event.

• Former winners, Michele Reale (1997), Iain Pyman (1999, 02), Marco Bernardini (2000) and Jamie Donaldson (2001) are all bidding to make European Tour history by winning the same event when it was purely a European Challenge Tour event and then a European Tour tournament.

• All the previous nine champions have played on the Challenge Tour before graduating onto The European Tour at some stage. To date, there have been 154 European Tour victories by 78 different former Challenge Tour players.

• England’s Malcolm Mackenzie will be heading towards a milestone as he moves closer to 600 European Tour events. He is competing in his 599th European Tour event this week and needs to make just one more appearance after the Imperial Collection Russian Open to become just the fourth player to achieve 600 tournaments.